The core mp3 player, however, is in actionscript.

OH darn I thought it was all via jscript. Was excited for media streaming in iPhone browser if that was the case.

Maybe some form of jscript module soon will be robust enough to natively play audio files!

Don't see how that's possible without the OS exposing some kind of API, or if the browser latches on to that API. Either way, there is no portability here. Your best bet is Java, not JavaScript, or maybe just plain ol' Flash.

Could javascript convert an mp3 to a wav that any browser can play on the fly? I'm sure someone could make that.

The question is speed.

Given how awesome it would be for music sites on the iphone and other flashless mobile browsers, I'd love to see sometime try.

here's the answer:

http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#the-video-element http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/#the-audio-element

... but with the exception of IE (unless someone write some kind of activex to support it)

I'm sure it would be relatively trivial to make an activex plugin to support <video> and <audio>. The trick is getting the IE drones to actually install it... most of them are still using IE6, which is now 2 versions behind as of a few weeks ago.

What is the point of hiding the Flash interface in favor of a js powered interface? This thing still relies on Flash. IT is a cool demo but completely roundabout to add an extra layer of abstraction in the form of js.

Well it is nice to have the interface in javascript. Easier to build in to a normal page and change styling without having to open up a flash editor and re-compiling.

When coding a flash app, keep all interface elements externally as an imagemap(an external png with UI elements in it and an xml which defines the coordinates of ui elements in the png). Then reskinning would require only updating the imagemap rather than recompiling the swf.

By hiding the flash core ,basically they are exposing the flash apis to javascript .This would be helpful for frontend developers who are not comfortable with flash, but want to build a decent mp3 player .Other than the advantage for developers , i dont really think there is any functional advantage for the end user.

This player is nothing special.

You can find the original Flash<->JS interface, by Scott Schiller, here: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

It's an awesome piece of work, and has been around for years.